This invention relates to, in general, a supervisory system that monitors the vital signs of patients at home or in a health-care facility.
There is currently no cost effective means of continuously supervising an entire building full of patients from a central point. Accordingly, several problems have developed with patient care. When an emergency situation develops, it must be detected by supervisory staff before it can be dealt with. After detection, the response to emergencies can only occur after the proper professionals have been informed, and the problem is diagnosed. This process can take from several minutes to several hours, even in a fully-staffed hospital. There is no feasible way to employ the number of staff required to effectively supervise patients located in hundreds of separate rooms throughout a facility.
The inability to record the vital signs of patients (located outside Intensive Care Units) on a 24-hour basis leads to problems with medical analysis. Individual readings can be missed or conducted improperly, leading to inaccurate interpretation of results. Lengthy time intervals between readings increase the probability that smaller trends will be missed, and that errant readings will alter results. Difficulties in manually storing and retrieving the results of hundreds or thousands of tests make it nearly impossible to examine several consecutive weeks or months of a patient's vital signs.
When a substantial distance, such as several miles, separates a doctor from his or her patients, all these problems increase by several magnitudes. Outpatients are rarely examined more than a few times a week, so their medical emergencies often go entirely undetected. When outpatient problems are discovered, it takes several times longer for the proper personnel to diagnose and respond to the condition than it would for inpatients. Medical trend analysis is also much less effective and accurate for outpatients.
Existing electronic means of patient monitoring have been developed to avoid such difficulties, such systems typically consist of high-cost intelligent patient monitors linked together in local area networks. However, because of design and capability limitations, these systems do not serve as feasible, cost-effective, facility-wide central monitoring systems. They are typically more suited for limited numbers of patients requiring specific services.
Current solutions generally suffer from several shortcomings. The high cost of these systems prohibits the purchase of sufficient resources to monitor entire health-care facilities, or renders such purchases as non cost-effective. They do not have the power to effectively supervise large numbers of patients simultaneously, especially over expansive geographic areas. They do not provide the flexibility needed to account for various levels of patient mobility, to easily and quickly re-distribute resources such as patient monitors to new locations, or to efficiently upgrade system capacity as technology improves. Existing systems are difficult for non-technical personnel to learn and operate, and they do not provide the fault-tolerance for operator error/abuse and equipment failure which is needed in a critical medical application. Furthermore, the selection and presentation of the data gathered by these systems does not facilitate the effective supervision of large numbers of patients.
A major purpose of this invention is to provide a system which provides an optimum selection of data to be presented and optimum arrangement of that data so as to make feasible and useful the monitoring of a large number of patients in a fashion that increases the likelihood and enhances the ability of having an immediate response to conditions which require immediate response.
Another purpose of this invention is to employ known, low-cost, standard types of units, in a configuration which provides the capacity to monitor large numbers of patients, allows for the flexible, dynamic distribution of resources, provides sufficient fault-tolerance, and permits the efficient upgrade of system components as component design increases capacity of data handling, sensitivity, and scope of vital signs monitored.
More specifically, it is a purpose of this invention to 1) provide earlier detection and diagnosis of medical emergencies, 2) provide better warning and notification of patient emergencies, 3) reduce the time interval between readings of vital signs, 4) reduce the number of staff required to supervise patients, 5) provide better historic records of vital signs, 6) allow greater accuracy in medical trend analysis when compared to present methods, and 7) to provide the above at a cost which makes it feasible for an institution to adopt the system.